Over the years, I’ve built a number of file servers to suit my needs, all based on Linux, and mostly using software RAID in Linux. Unfortunately, there’s a number of issues that never seem to sit well with me.

So, needing to build (yet again) a newer, bigger file server, I started looking for alternatives. I considered Windows Home Server, freeNAS, OpenFiler, and others, including unRAID.

I finally settled on unRAID, as you might guess from the title of this story. Here’s just a few of the reasons:

1. It can spin down disks when they aren’t being used
2. Making a single disk larger is a piece of cake
3. Your disks do NOT need to be all the same size
4. The price is reasonable
5. It’s Linux based, albeit on Slackware (I know, you just vomited a little, so did I)
6. There’s a very active community surrounding it

So far, I’m very happy. I purchased a Norco 4220 case, with 20 hard drive bays, hopefully enough expansion room for a number of years. I’m using an older Asus A8N-SLI motherboard, with 2 PCIe x16 slots, which each house a Super Micro AOC-SASLP-MVP8. I tossed in 2GB of RAM, but it’s probably not necessary just to serve files.

In any case, if you’re stuck in a situation similar to mine, take a good look at unRAID. You might be really glad you did.

Maybe someday I can do a talk on unRAID at my local Linux Users Group.

While trolling the unRAID forums today, I ran across an app called Hard Disk Sentinel. They have a range of applications available for a variety of hard disk monitoring, but their free Linux app is the one I’m writing about today. You simply download the binary and run it on a system as root, and you’ll get output like this:

HDD Device  0: /dev/sda
HDD Model ID : WDC WD15EADS-00P8B0
HDD Serial No: WD-WMAVU1631157
HDD Revision : 01.00A01
HDD Size     : 1430799 MB
Interface    : S-ATA II
Temperature  : 24 °C
Health       : 100 %
Performance  : 100 %
Power on time: 8 days, 22 hours
Est. lifetime: more than 1000 days

Pretty handy, and much more readable. Mind you this is an “at a glance” view of your disk, but it can point out a number of useful things, like which disks are oldest in your system, which are running hot, etc.